Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Nykoli Aleksander When Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal in 1972 I was in hospital getting cartilage scraped out of my knee. It was a magic time in sports. Miami going undefeated, The Oakland A's with all those cool names (Catfish Hunter, Blue Moon Odom) blasting through the Big Red Machine (Pete Rose, Johnny Bench) in the world series.
But it was Mark Spitz that everyone was talking about. The day after he won his seventh medal I was hobbling around and went to the hospital gift shop. They had a rack of Mark Spitz posters with him wearing red, white and blue trunks and seven olympic gold medals around his neck.
Then Mark Spitz was everywhere you looked. Billboards, magazine covers TV. I remember him on a big deal Bob Hope Special where he wore some strange Chattaqua outfit complete with a straw hat and bamboo cane, and sang and danced a duet with Bob Hope. He was terrible.
He was even worse on the "Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour". He couldn't act, tell a joke or sing a song. He was as bad as your next door neighbor would be on TV. (The next door neighbor who always refused to throw your ball back when it went into his yard. That neighbor.)
It sort of amazing that we never had to see Mark Spitz in some Superfly knock off movie, or see him in some big swimming movie where he mentors some loser kid to super stardom.
I'm sure the offers were out there so I suspect that it was his decision and not the exploitation producers. The whole thing is we kept watching. Seven gold medals and as terrible as Spitz was he always looked like he was having fun, as much fun as we would if we were in his place.
Then abruptly he stopped it all, went back to IUPUI (Indian University-Purdue University-Indianapolis) and finished up his dentistry degree . . . dentistry . . . is anything less fun?
A lot of guys on TV were stunned by this. I'm sure Spitz's agent wasn't too thrilled either. There was an awful lot of commentary about how dentists have the highest suicide rate in any profession.
The same people who were (fairly) bum rapping his abilities on TV were now bemoaning Spitz's proposed absence.
I thought it was cool. Even my parents had long serious discussions about whether Spitz was doing the right thing.
One thing that they mainly ignored was Mark Spitz's hair. In an era when swimmers routinely shaved their entire bodies in an effort to get that dolphin like streamlined thing going. When they showed that a single lock of hair could add one thousandth of a second to your time Spitz didn't shave his body and he wore a mustache and a moddish haircut.
When every coach and parent in the US was yelling at their kids to get a haircut Spitz's arrogance and confidence seemed totally cool to us. And being cool he became a hero.
I don't know much about Michael Phelps. Like most of us I only really heard of him just now. I know he's from Michigan, or at least goes to Michigan.
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Unknown He's got a website, but nowadays, who doesn't.
What I do know is he tied Spitz with seven medals. He's got a shot at busting two records. He can get an 8th medal and join Spitz as the only athlete ever to win every single event he entered. Rah.
I hope he follows Spitz's career all the way and becomes an aggravating fixture in the media and then after he burns all the fun out of being super famous he calmly and happily goes back to his life.
How cool.

My friend is still working like a mad woman.
She had visions of being finished yesterday but encountered a major snafu involving misappropriation of funds or at least unauthorized use of nonexistent funds or something like that (over my head). It wasn't malfeasance just bone headed and wrong.
Since part of the snafu's guy's job is to prevent this sort of thing its becoming a monstrous undertaking getting it sorted out. My friend also has to move around the cash to cover his "bad checks". So, well, the hope is she'll finish today and slowly get our life back.
She didn't take a dog with her today. Seems foolish to me. Dogs are very good at this sort of stuff.
She told me about an email she sent out with the subject line, "The Year End That Wouldn't". Which is a pretty good joke for an accountant (controller).
She was looking at this website in a browser instead of the rss feed. She was pretty impressed with how it looked.
I like how the pages look here. I don't think she understand that I can reread my story just by looking at the pictures.
The words really are here just to frame the pictures.